“Some kids we just lose,” Melissa Rysemus, the principal of Interagency Academy, an alternative school in Seattle, told me. During more than a year of remote instruction, only about half of the school’s children attended classes, and some of them didn’t turn on their cameras.

Then Covid-19 arrived, and he no longer could attend support meetings and no longer had to take urine tests — “no support and no accountability,” as his mother put it. Dell received some wrenching personal news and coped by shooting heroin. He overdosed, and the hospital barely brought him back to life.

Dell returned to drugs, and his baby soon had to get medical treatment for somehow ingesting meth when his parents were high. In quick succession, Dell lost his job, lost the baby to foster care, lost his apartment and gave up his other son to be raised by others.

A good man who loved his children and had been doing so well had seen his life collapse and was now living in his car with his new wife. His baby is now being put up for adoption.

“Life is bleak and I did it to myself,” he texted me recently. “Living in a 1996 Honda Civic and not seeing my kids because I don’t have a roof is the worst.” He asked me to help by investing in a scheme he had devised to house people in shipping containers.

“If you would go out on a limb for us,” he said, “it might just save our lives.”

I was heartsick, but Dell’s mother, who herself has been drug-free for six years, begged me not to give him money or anything that he could sell; she fears that the proceeds would go to drugs that would kill him. The best hope to save his life, she said wretchedly, is for him to be arrested and go through detox.

“I’ve never seen him this bad,” his mother told me.

This column may seem like a depressing read, but the truth is that while people relapse into addiction, they also, miraculously, pull themselves out — with help.

Years ago in Nashville I met Shelia Simpkins, who was trafficked into prostitution at the age of 6. She spent many years enslaved by violent pimps, struggling with addiction and repeatedly getting arrested but finally left with the help of a program called Thistle Farms. She earned a B.A. and helped countless other women start over.